The world is a tree. The norse Yggdrasil, The Tree of Knowledge, the Cabalistic Sephiroth. The Shaman makes his drum from wood taken from The Cosmic Tree that grows out of the umbilicus of the Earth, the world-tree that represents the universe in its continuous renewal, its endless life [1].
The tree is also the book of Fate, on each of its leaves a human fate is written down. And any tree is the Tree of Knowledge: by means of trees we can read the world and get an insight into the essence of reality. In Celtic languages "tree" and "learning" are synonymous, speech and trees are connected, thus druid means poet as well as "oak-seer". Odinism is a Nordic shamanism, also a tree cult, as is reflected in the name of the main god Odin-Woden. Also here trees and writing are related. The main god Odin was also the god of writing, and in order to obtain the occult knowledge about runes, he accepted to hang in the Yggdrasil for nine days and nights.
To write is to conjure, it is to create reality. The letters are pregnant with reality, with life - everything in the world is alive and animated. Matter is the mother of all life: matter - mater - mother. Our Earth itself is alive. It is an organism that we should take care of and pay respect to, as a living sanctuary. Plinius the elder (A.D. 23-79) warned against digging too deep in the earth in the search for minerals; he thought that earthquakes could be the counterreaction from Mother Earth against such outrages as mining. In Metamorphoses (A.D. 7) Ovidius writes about the misdeeds that were done to the Earth during the epoch of iron, and in Paradise Lost John Milton (1608-1674) talks of men that with sharp picks hurt the living Earth. One thought of the minerals as the blood of the earth, still today we speak of a "gold vein" in mineralogy [2].
The cosmic tree is also the axis of the world, the bridge between the holy and the profane. It is the link between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the connection between analogous worlds. Man-microcosm is "analogous" to universe-macrocosm, the universe is both around and inside us, transcendence as well as here. Microcosm, the profane space, is the world of randomness and decay, while macrocosm, the holy world, is filled with significance and independent of coincidence.
These notions appear in the oldest tales about the world. The ideas about connections between below and above, between matter and life, between world and word, were brought along through the centuries as a central part of the esoterical doctrines, down to the beginning of science when the division line between alive and inert matter was drawn up, and the magical and animistic elements were finally abandoned.